Cartridge break-in: with or without tears?

Or: how do you do it? I think I must have gone about it the wrong way. This weekend I changed my very old cartridge with its broken-down suspension for a new Benz Glider. With this new cartridge I listened to records in the normal fashion for a couple of days, happy enough with what I was hearing but calculating how many weeks it would be until I got to hear what the cartridge would sound like once it was broken in--and thus until I would be in a position to decide whether my turntable (a Rega P3) was something I could live with for a while longer or whether (as I suspect) it really needs to be replaced with something considerably better very soon.

Then I got impatient. I set the stylus down on the locked-out pink noise section of a Cardas frequency sweep burn-in record (well cleaned beforehand) and let it play for a few hours. Every once in a while it occurred to me to wonder whether this could possibly be a good idea, since normal vinyl doesn't like a stylus repeating the same track even twice over within a couple of hours, and here was this track being traced some hundreds of times all during the same afternoon. Meanwhile the pink noise was still pink (though what else would even *destroyed* pink noise sound like?), and nothing was smoking. After three or four uneasy hours I decided enough was enough and went to lift the arm. The stylus had accumulated gray junk all over it and up the cantilever. Since I'd brushed and Premiered and RRL'd and Loricrafted the record beforehand it seemed unlikely that the junk was record mould release or normal dirt, which left the unhappy possibility that it was instead chewed up vinyl, ploughed up by my brand new stylus. I cleaned everything up, and the cartridge sounds okay (or sufficiently okay: I am guessing that the tizzy treble I sometimes get is a matter either of bad lps or of the cartridge's newness). So I am hoping I did no real harm (except to the break-in record, which had other problems in any case). But I feel I may have narrowly averted real damage.

So what do you guys say? Have you ever done this, and have you ended up with pulverized vinyl and traumatized cartridge? Have you all known from the beginning not to try this?

I am coming to the unhappy conclusion that I don't deserve to upgrade my turntable this year or possibly ever.